Through interdisciplinary historical inquiry, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the Newsaddresses the many ways in which this question has been asked, answered, and framed from the dawn of the illustrated press to today’s digital news platforms by professional news editors, illustrators, photographers, and cultural and art historians. The book newly defines what counts as a news picture and offers an expansive understanding of how such images –wood engravings, drawings, paintings, photographs, film and video – were selected and distributed, where readers saw them, and what their value is, and has been, to us. Through a series of over fifty short, original essays, the volume brings together a concentrated group of news picture scholars who offer their investigations to a larger scholarly community of all those interested in understanding how news pictures have both captured and written the past, and the importance of the news to history itself. The book’s international, intergenerational, and rigorously interdisciplinary approach to the visual culture of the news has broad pedagogical value to a wide spectrum of fields, including communications, media studies, business, art history, history, and visual culture studies.

Getting the Picture is divided into two main sections, ‘Big Pictures’ and ‘Re-thinking the History of News Pictures.” The first offers twenty-six short analyses of single news pictures, many of which are iconic images, in chronological succession. The second, larger, section of the book is divided into five chapters: ‘News Pictures and Press Genres,’ ‘News Picture Media,’ ‘News Picture Time,’ ‘Speaking of News Pictures,’ and ‘News Picture Connoisseurship.’ Each of these chapters is comprised of longer essays on subthemes such as fashion, celebrity, war, sports, crime, disaster, and exoticism, in addition to news picture media and technologies.

This website offers scholars and teachers ideas and materials for how Getting the Picture might be used in curricula. Included are syllabi that have utilized the book; reviews with further insight on the book’s many scholarly and pedagogical uses; news picture, photography history, and newspaper digital archives; and examples of the images addressed in the book.